COLLEGE, CAREERS & CASH
The College, Careers & Cash program is a financial empowerment curriculum designed to help Delaware students envision their future and plan for it.
College, Careers & Cash offers workshops that build a continuum for high school students starting in 10th grade that puts them on the pathway to post-secondary education and careers.
This custom-designed curriculum consists of interactive and engaging classroom workshops to help students understand the relationships between a lifestyle goal, educational attainment and a realistic budget.
Program goals:
- Expand the impact of CTE Pathways (where applicable) for 10th graders by helping them to understand how post-secondary education can be the first step in the achievement of major life goals
- Demonstrate the linkages between higher education and career opportunities
- Connect the dots between career pathways, post-secondary education, and lifestyle
- Integrate financial literacy into high school programming to build an understanding of how much money is needed to support lifestyle goals
- Build a continuum for high school students starting in 10th grade that puts them on the pathway to post-secondary education
- Engage school administration, faculty, and staff to work in partnership with this project
Session #1: College
In the first workshop session, students explore the realities of being an independent, adult consumer, using JumpStart.org to calculate the true cost of their lifestyle choices. Students then discuss various careers that provide the income needed to support their chosen lifestyle, and, lastly, explore the correlation between income, education, and employment.
Session #2: Careers
In the second session, student use the online Occupational Outlook Handbook to explore a career of their choosing, examining tasks performed, education required, and income earned, among other details. Students then track the job outlook of their chosen career against national and state job growth charts. By examining cost-of-living differences nationwide, they begin to determine what lifestyle their career can afford them.
Session #3: Cash
In the final session, students use the income data for their chosen career to revisit their lifestyle choices and they create a budget for those choices according to their monthly entry-level net incomes. Students then decide either how to minimize their deficit or make use of their surplus. Lastly, using their budget as a benchmark, students consider the steps necessary to achieve their educational, career, and lifestyle goals.
What students are saying about CCC
“The most important thing I learned was how much it really cost to live on your own. If you want to have a nice lifestyle, then you have to have a great education to achieve that goal”
“I learned a lot about finance, education, and professions that I could go into after participating in College, Careers, and Cash”
“I learned how to budget both actively and predicatively and how to manage the breakdown of a monthly income”
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